


All My Exits Became U-Turns

by bubblesbythebeach



Series: Unobservable Phenomena [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Multi, Post-Reichenbach, Pre-Series, Pre-Slash, Romance, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-16
Updated: 2013-02-16
Packaged: 2017-11-29 11:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/686564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bubblesbythebeach/pseuds/bubblesbythebeach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>DI Lestrade’s life is going in circles.</p><p>or</p><p>Twenty-seven years in which Greg gives up smoking, falls in love, unwisely wears his board shorts, loses his wedding ring, makes friends, is a fool, buys a car with GPS, and drowns. Not in that order. And then someone blows up Baker Street again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All My Exits Became U-Turns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wilde_and_free](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wilde_and_free/gifts).



> This fic is dedicated to courage, and born out of love for Rupert Graves' bunny rabbit teeth.
> 
> But it cannot exist without roranniecus and whoisriversong, who did nothing much really but they're nice folks. (Sorry for making you cry today.)
> 
> It contains:  
>  Two very important Baker Street Christmas parties.  
>  Sebastian Moran's business card.  
>  Thailand, Dorset, Dartmoor and Santorini.  
>  Greg Lestrade's terrifyingly big heart.  
> 

It actually starts with their eyes meeting across a half-dimmed living room. The cushions are small and hard, maroon specks in the plush swamp of couches. No one feels like sitting. It’s just a sideways flicker of brown eyes, at first. Taking stock of all these strangers in this room with them, defaulting to bewildered and shy no matter how many friends they’ve dragged along to this party and somehow lost between drinks.

She knocks back her head and laughs when he introduces himself.

“Greg _Lestrade_?” She keeps a giggle in her mouth with a press of three fingertips. “Sorry. Just. Sounds odd, those two names together.” Her hand drops back down and an apologetic grin rises up to meet her sparkling eyes. A red bangle free-falls down her wrist.

He looks away, smiles, then pulls his eyes straight back up again. “Yeah, I know. The French is very diluted, though.”

She nods. She raises her drink, doesn’t sip yet but keeps the tumbler in front of her chin like a guard. “If you go way back in my family there’s a bit of French and Italian,” she says conversationally. “The rest of it’s all Irish, though.” Eyes still wild and brilliant over her glass as she closes her lips over the rim and waits for his reply.

Greg looks his fill. Her name is Caroline. Her hair is _huge_ – all reddish-brown frizz and fluffed about her shoulders. Her mouth is small but her lips are full, her cheeks are round, her neck goes on forever and maybe he’s had a few by now but Greg’s brain keeps slamming it into the front wall of his skull: She. Is. Gorgeous.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look a lot like Sigourney Weaver?” he blurts.

“Hmm?” An eyebrow rises like a cool wave.

Greg gestures vaguely with the hand that is not fisted on his thigh and preparing to punch his own eye. “Only, you know, curvier.” He means her face, her face! Rounder face! _Damn it, Greg!_

“And—And much more charming,” he stutters.

Caroline snorts through half a mouthful of beer and Greg just rolls his eyes to the ceiling, prays for this conversation to just be a dream, and pretends not to notice the bubbly spit on Caroline’s chin.

But their eyes meet again and it’s all either of them can think about so – as Caroline reaches for the coffee table and presses a napkin to her mouth – they laugh for two minutes straight and grab each other’s arms like they’re old friends. They’ve definitely had a few.

Caroline keeps one hand on Greg’s elbow when they calm down. The napkin has a ring of rosy lipstick on it, wrinkling under the moisture.

“God, that’s embarrassing…” She bites her lip involuntarily; her teeth are white as a torn orange skin. “Um, it sounds like they’re about to cut the cake in the backyard?”

In one smooth movement Greg takes her tumbler and puts it on the coffee table, already crowded with other cups and wine glasses. “Cake? I am _there_.”

He was a stranger ten minutes ago, but she doles out her happiness so freely. She slips on a smile, and it is genuine, and it stays. She slides the rest of her arm past Greg's elbow.

They shimmy through the crowded kitchen and on the other side of the screen door is a world of green grass lit up by fairy lights and party-goers that move and jump with winged feet, lifted up by the sheer joy of youth.

Greg is twenty-one. He and Caroline are inseparable for the next two decades.

*

There’s one photo from their honeymoon that they show off the most often: At a zoo an hour’s drive from Bangkok, Caroline has sunglasses buried in her mass of curls and Greg’s eggshell blue shirt is streaked up and down with sweat. They’ve been together four years. In the photo Greg and Caroline are sitting on either side of an adult tiger with their hands on both of its warm flanks. The tiger is yawning hugely at the camera, revealing a pink maw of tongue and teeth.

“Look at the wrinkles around its nose! It’s adorable!” Caroline shrieks when they develop the rolls of film at home.

When his wife had paid for an elephant ride, Greg had only managed to snap three photos before her hysterical cries of, “Hurry up, we have to balance it out, holy crap holy crap Greg I’m slipping _come on_!” force him to scramble up the ladder. He steps from the platform onto the seat to meet Caroline’s silhouette in the sunlight – that single second of imbalance and lack of solid ground under his sandalled feet is enough to tear a helpless laugh out of his mouth. No wonder Caroline calls him her “little bunny rabbit”; he bares his front teeth so often in boyish “hehe”s.

The elephant driver moves his stick in an almost invisible flick of the wrist, and the speckled grey head in front of their feet begins to bob. Greg slides over the cushion and gathers Caroline to him. They kiss. She already stinks of elephant. He’s sure he does, too.

The ride is one long wobble. Their elephant’s leathery ears flap constantly as if they’re all preparing to take off into the clouds.

*

“Fancy a movie this weekend, love?” Greg asks over breakfast.

Caroline rolls her eyes; strangely enough it’s a very involved action that includes rolling her head on her neck and sighing softly. She’s never one to do things halfway. “Thought you’d never ask. Been bored all week.”

Greg nods at the kitchen window. “Nice day out,” he says around a corner of toast. Egg yolk runs down his chin in luscious golden drips.

Caroline grimaces, the left side of her mouth and cheek crinkling upwards. “God, you’re disgusting.”

Greg swallows his toast and thrusts his chin forward, smiling obscenely with his lips glued together by runny egg. His chair scrapes back and he starts to lean over the table for a kiss.

“Damn it, Greg, stop!” Caroline screams at him and twists in her chair and throws a napkin at his head.

Because Caroline’s held a flame for Leonardo DiCaprio for a while, they see _The Beach_ at the cinema. Turns out it was filmed on location in Thailand, though not in the region they’d visited on their honeymoon.

“Well. That was bloody dark,” Caroline quips as they leave.

Greg sticks his hands in his pockets and chuckles at his wife’s irritation. It’s set to be a mild evening, nothing more than the tiniest of afternoon breezes and whitish clouds smearing the sky accompanying their walk to the bus stop. Greg quickens his pace to catch up to Caroline and pecks her cheek. A bit of the disappointment melts away at the touch of his stubbly chin. She lowers her shoulders, tugs at the sleeves of her red cardigan, kicks a little at the ground on her next step and smirks up at her husband.

That night Greg thanks God for macaroni and cheese, and Caroline puts in their VHS of _True Lies_. It’s an old favourite of theirs and they cuddle on the couch wearing pyjamas soft and loose with age, giggling at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s exploits. The empty bowls soak in the sink – neither of them wants to touch crusty cheese on a night like this.

Greg’s thirty-three. Maybe it’s time they made some changes to married life, he thinks.

*

Caroline’s got nieces now. Greg’s mates are becoming dads, one by one. And if Greg keeps at it, he could probably make detective sergeant by the end of the year, so there’d be a bit of extra money. Caroline’s got three different schools on her roster now, three different school counsellor’s offices. Keeps her on her toes, she says, but she wouldn’t be human if she denied occasionally getting bored with solving the problems of other people’s children.

When Greg says, “We could. You know. Start _trying_. Listen Caro, do you have a sec, could we talk about—” the answer is a resounding, “Bedroom in five minutes.”

And he feels young again, so, so young – not that he isn’t fit now, but there’s just a _freshness_ in starting something new. It’s like a second honeymoon, Caroline stretching back pale and supple, Greg following the division down the centre of her body from the gap between her collarbones and then her breasts, through the butterfly sweep of her ribcage and her abdominal muscles with his tongue. Decision made, they attack each other, biting and pinching places they’d forgotten and left behind. Everything is new. Every patch of skin Greg presses between his lips is like an upside down playing card. He pulls at them all and finds aces of hearts glaring crimson at him.

And yet, it’s not a regression. It’s a beginning of an unworn path. There are lines around Caroline’s eyes when she blinks at him in a haze of warmth and sleepy pleasure, a mature weight to her hips and shoulders compared to the wisp of a woman she’d been in her twenties. And Greg’s a serious copper now, on the nicotine patches and not at an age where he can pull off black leather jackets like he used to. Not with those early grey hairs sprouting at his temples like young bamboo shoots.

At the stroke of midnight Greg crawls down the bed, pulls the sheets away, and places one kiss on Caroline’s plump navel. She giggles and squirms under his warm breath, brings a knee up to knock his shoulder. Greg catches her thigh in the crook of his elbow and rubs up and down her skin with his hand.

“Tickles, tickles— _Greg_ ,” Caroline warns. “Too _tired_ to fight you…!”

“As you should be.” Greg smiles with eyes and teeth and heart. In a limbo of young and old, newness and familiarity, Greg crawls back up, pushes his face into her neck and falls asleep.

*

It’s a nightmare in disguise. Greg dreams about a lagoon, which his sleeping brain tells him is somewhere in Thailand, coloured a stronger blue than Venice’s. The lagoon is circled by almost mountainous, tree-covered islands. It’s so salty that he’s buoyant enough to swim without a vest, so he swishes his arms through the water and beats his legs slowly underneath him.

He hears a noise, turns around in time to see Caroline diving off the back of their boat. He’ll check her tonight and she’ll have fierce tan lines on her chest, all along the edges of her bikini top. But for the moment she begins a lazy breaststroke, before turning over to try a backstroke through the flat slab of blueness, face staring up at the top of the island ridges.

Then Caroline straightens up in the water, tucks her legs under her, and ducks her head down in one great effort.

There are five fingers on Greg’s ankle, soft, almost fondling, before his head rushes under.

He waits, but he doesn’t rise back up. He stares – his eyes don’t sting at all – on and on into shades of aquamarine. That’s how the dream ends, and it’s a bit of an anti-climax. He simply wakes up alone on his side of the bed with the blanket tucked under one armpit and the bedroom curtains singeing under the force of nearly-noon.

“Up now, Greggy?”

He rolls over, eyelids heavy and vision grey, arm flopping over a luscious hip. Caroline’s skin has been smoothed by sleep and the constant touch of sheets. His mouth on the other hand feels dry and rough, but he mumbles, “Dream.”

“Mmm?”

“Remember when we went to Phuket? Phi Phi Island.”

A mewl of agreement, but then backtracking in confusion. “Greg, we didn’t.”

He swings his elbow up and puts his hand behind his head, looking at Caroline and burrowing his cheek further into the pillow. “What? Nah, got to be, we went down from Bangkok.”

Caroline crinkles her nose. “No, we went north to Chiang Mai. Greg, you made it up in your head.”

Greg goes still. He remembers Leo DiCaprio. But he also remembers the feeling of swimming in that cold water, in all that deep stillness with flecks of green creeping into his vision and the feeling of going insane in the split second before he sunk.

“Oh. Must have dreamt about the movie.”

“You silly.” Caroline reaches over, fingers coming to rest under his ear, and kisses him with her eyes closed.

*

If it weren’t for Thatcher, Greg would have named her Margaret – would have taken endless delight in calling his daughter “Maggie” for the rest of her life.

But – inevitably – fucking Thatcher.

*

They wait. It doesn’t happen.

*

They meet with perfect timing on a downright awful day. Greg Lestrade has his sergeant’s badge, but he’s started smoking again. That afternoon (and without his knowledge) his wife is locking herself inside the bathroom, and little does he know he’s going to be home very late. For Sherlock Holmes, he’s just gotten his stab wound cleaned up.

“I’m going to read your statement back to you, alright?”

The boy under the white sheets licks his lips. Greg almost swears he’s rolling his eyes, but his left one is ringed by purpling skin, all over the socket and down to his cheekbone. It’s hard to meet his eyes among all the warm bruises, but the nurses have cleaned his skin of dried blood and he… He shines. Pale and ghostly as the moon. There’s a cool alertness that vibrates through the line of his body. Greg can feel his stare on him.

“Don’t bother. You took my statement and I’m perfectly aware of who did it. You have a man to catch, Detective Sergeant.”

Greg clears his throat. “We collected the knife he stabbed you with—”

“He’s the Holden killer. It was the tie pin, it didn’t match, it didn’t _fit_.”

“Wait. What?” Greg doesn’t register himself leaning back after the boy’s rush of words.

“String of murders. Last three weeks. Broad daylight. I knew he was the killer, I confronted him…”

Greg hurriedly looks down at his clipboard. “This isn’t in your statement—Holden killer? Did he confess while you—What evidence leads you to believe—”

“The _tie pin_!” The boy’s eyes are open wide now and his mouth bent into a snarl. “That girl was going to be his next victim; I _found_ the next scene of the crime for you!”

And he’d gotten a knife wound in the calf. They’d taken the girl in as a witness of the stabbing.

Greg swallows hard, set his pen and paper aside and leans forward with his elbows on his knees. His fingers lace together in front of him. “Look, Sherlock, calm down. I need you to explain it all in detail. You can talk me through it.”

At that the boy on the hospital bed doubles over and groans. In a flash his hands are at his temples, rubbing fitfully at the pallid skin, fingertips tangling into his sweaty, black curls.

“I can’t. I know, I _know_ it. It’s all just _there_ —but all messy… I can’t tell you. I know all of it but it starts with the tie pin in his father’s drawer… _Fuck!_ It’s in my head, I can’t say all of it, not all of it. Everyone—People never _see_!” Sherlock pounds the bed with his fist.

Mistake. Something catches Greg’s eye. “Sherlock, mate. Give me your arm.”

“He’s the one killing those people in Piccadilly, that’s all, he’s the one…” Suddenly he’s gone soft and quiet, voice almost like a moan of exhaustion. But when Greg takes hold of his wrist and turns it to see the old marks at the crook of his delicate elbow, he simply looks up and declares, “It helps me think. It… cleans everything up. I could tell you, then, Sergeant. Step by step.”

The look in Sherlock’s eyes, angled up at him from his sitting position on the bed, slows down Greg’s heart and sends a weight tumbling down his gut. This boy is smart. This boy is so, so right but wrong, everywhere.

He should be tougher than this – it’s not even eight o’clock in the evening yet – but it’s too much for Greg to deal with professionally, not today. He stands and swipes his hand down Sherlock’s shoulder in a quick attempt at a consoling pat. But it only looks like he’s not quite willing to touch him anymore.

“I bet they want to check on your leg soon.”

“Sergeant,” comes the warning admonition, a green-eyed glare.

Greg tilts his head at him. “You gave us a name. That’s enough for now. I might… I’ll come back to see you, Sherlock. We’ll talk soon.”

They find the owner of the knife, and then Greg pulls up the evidence collected from the Piccadilly cases and the death of Ashley Holden and they _match_ – it’s the same man – and how the bloody hell did a twenty-something year old kid figure this out? Who would then _walk up to someone he’d known to be a murderer?_

Greg does track down Sherlock after he’s released from the hospital. Three years later, Sherlock Holmes stands over a crime scene, sleeves rolled up in the August heat, and the constables are stunned into silence as he just _goes for it_. Sherlock doesn’t mind having an audience encroaching on his space when it’s quick and easy.

“… the white powder, right there, that’s oyster shell but it’s been _crushed_ , now what’s that for I wonder, oh that’s right, to help the chickens lay with stronger shells, but I can tell you that if you find a man in his sixties living in one of the houses on this street, you can explain why the victim’s car is missing. Half the chickens are dead, should have known—died at the same time as the victim—Lestrade, your murderer is a young man, unstable, but he doesn’t have possession of the car.”

Sherlock spins on his heel. “Lestrade, get me an interview with the witness. Don’t bother if he lives across the intersection, there’s no line of sight possible. This street only.”

Greg shakes his head – but he’s getting used to the sense of disbelief after this long. “Right then, Jones and Murphy: you’re on door-knocking duty. Really, Sherlock, you’re sure this is going to clear up _anything?_ ”

Sherlock falls into step beside him as they walk back to the parked police cars and leave Forensics to resume their examination of the body. It’s a whisper quiet residential area, with small dogs leaping around on balconies and watching them walk through the morning sunshine.

“I have something of a success rate now, Lestrade.”

Maybe it’s the slight curve of Sherlock’s arms under his rolled up sleeves, that promise of lean meat and muscle that he’d been regaining, just the sight of his lithe body beginning to take shape next to Greg as they stroll. Maybe it’s the flush of colour in his cheeks and the diamond fire in his eyes.

Or, instead, the memory of Sherlock’s first success with DI Lestrade at his side, when Sherlock had unfolded the history of that locked room like peeling away the petals of a lotus, stirred up by his mention of a now-established “success rate”. No more hair-pulling or temple-rubbing. He doesn’t need the cocaine to clean up that head of his anymore, but keeps it in order himself like a fastidious gardener. It’s growing every day, finding and delighting in new knowledge.

He’s not sure what it is but it’s a glorious summer day with a dead body in the backyard and Greg’s chest is puffed up like a feather pillow.

*

Three years after that, however, Sherlock has a _better_ success rate, and he knows it.

Greg’s beginning to think he’s an insufferable git. Most of his homicide team had reached that conclusion ages ago.

Some days are good. They solve everything that’s possible to solve and Sherlock’s so pleased he only offends one person on his way out.

Some days are not so good.

“This is childish,” Sherlock hisses.

“Well, I’m _dealing_ with a child!”

Hands on the hips, fingers curled, wrist moving forward and back in the air. Emphasise the right words, over-enunciate. “Sherlock, this is _our_ case; I am _letting_ you in but you _do not_ go off on your _own_ – clear?”

God, it’s like arguing with a ruddy teenage girl sometimes.

“Jennifer Wilson’s daughter died fourteen years ago, why would she still be upset?”

Half the air leaves Greg’s lungs, like he’s flinching from a phantom punch in the gut. Sherlock is in the centre of everyone’s collective gaze, whirling and spinning in what Greg would call confusion, if he didn’t know any better. But keep breathing, Greg, keep breathing. His mouth is closed shut like a leaden door, feels too heavy to lift. Keep breathing.

Sherlock really is like a child, sometimes. Lost. Looking for lines to take hold of, lines that will pull him up from the gunmetal waves like a struggling fish.

“Not good?”

“Bit not good, yeah,” John murmurs.

Greg is forty-three this year. All his hair’s gone grey, like his head is covered in a netted spider’s web. Dull strands alternating with silver ones that shine in the sun.

It’s been too long. He’s used to the idea, he tells himself. He’s forty-three. He’s a copper. He’s too old to be upset by this. By anything.

Suddenly Sherlock is slapping his hands on his thighs, mouth open in delight and icy eyes on fire.

“Oh, she was clever, _clever_. Yes! She's cleverer than you lot and she's _dead_! Do you see? Do you get it? She didn't lose her phone; she never lost it. She _planted_ it on him. When she got out of the car, she knew that she was going to her death so she left the phone in order to lead us to her killer.”

“But how?” Greg barked.

“What do you mean, how? Rachel. Don’t you see? _Rachel!_ ” Sherlock looks earnestly at Greg, John, and finds nothing.

“Oh. Look at you lot. You’re all so vacant…”

 **Rachel** _girl origin_ _**Hebrew** _ _meaning_ _**“ewe”** _ _variants_ _**Rachael** _ _all the way to_ _**Raychelle** _ _and_ _**Shelley** _ _…_

Pretty name, Greg thinks, just for a moment. And then the chase is on again.

*

Some days are the worst and days like that should be internationally banned and should burn and twist on Floor 9 of Hell.

He can still hear the kid’s voice in his head _. Te-enn…_

“Stephen, guess what?” Greg says into the pink phone. “We’re bringing Mum. Is that good? We’re bringing Mum to come get you. Listen, Stephen, I’m on my way right now – can you stay very still for three minutes? I’m bringing lots of police cars with me and we’ll be there in three minutes.”

As he says all this Greg’s eyes move constantly to look out of the passenger window and then back to the windscreen in front of him. He’d be driving himself, probably breaking land speed records, but when he’d tried giving the phone to Sergeant Donovan the boy had said, “No, I want Mr Inspector, please stay on,” and he just _couldn’t_.

Sally Donovan’s got the sirens on full blast, streaming down empty lanes as the traffic flees from the urgency of their noise. Her teeth are gritted so hard Greg can almost hear them squeaking painfully under Sally’s quiet growls.

The fucker’s put the kid in the middle of a school gymnasium.

When they finally meet Stephen face to face it takes hours for every part of the bomb to be checked and removed by the bomb squad. Stephen’s back is sagging but he keeps his head straight to look ahead, blinking in bewilderment as people kneel by him and scamper back and forth. His eyes are dark and shiny, like a small animal’s, the short black curls on his head flattened and stinking with hours of sweat.

When Greg finds the boy’s soft arms around his neck and his little legs somehow wrapped around his waist, whispers of, “Mr Inspector” in his ear… The day gets better. It’s still horrible, but something lifts away like dissolving storm clouds. Stephen’s mother even kisses him on both cheeks. Again and again, like she’s forgotten which cheek she’d already done and so keeps coming back.

Greg Lestrade’s face just doesn’t manage to stay dry. Scratch that, it’s a _great_ day.

*

Completely by coincidence, Caroline Lestrade shares one curse with Sherlock Holmes. Like mould on old meat, boredom sets in down to her very bones.

*

My parents would _hate_ me. You probably hate me, and that’s okay, go ahead, God. I want you to hate me. Please, this is terrible. I did something terrible, Greg, and I am so sorry because I love you, I still love you but I did it anyway. I said til death do us part, I love you so much, you were always _always_ the best thing that has ever happened to me. You’re the only man I’ve ever loved. I said til death do us part. Greg, Greg, I love you, I’m sorry, I’ll stop talking. I’ll go away if that’s what you want. I’ll stay with Annie for a week, and I’ll just wait for you to… think.

I’m sorry I hurt you, I _know_ I did, I know that look you have now. You are the centre of my world but I’m just so _bored_ , bored like it’s killing me. Not bored with you – never with you – but with my _life_ , my job, this house, bored of looking at the sky in the afternoon! Like, like, I’m dying and deep in my soul I’m just bored all the time and there’s nothing.

I just… felt bad and I took it out on our marriage, and Greg I am so sorry please please. There’s no way to fix this but I’ll do anything, Greg, just so we can go back. Make me prove it.

_leave_

_just leave_

_stop insulting me_

*

The next four months feel like one long loop, as if Greg’s brain has short-circuited and all the thoughts and feelings he has are the same. Greg Lestrade the man and Greg the husband and DI Lestrade the good copper who leads all these people around the darkest muddy veins of London—

—Lestrade with Sherlock Holmes on a broken leash, Greg the forty-four year old dorky silver-haired dad erased out of time, Lestrade who shouts at his consulting detective for using up all the blood samples, Greg with his phone turned off and Greg who misses _his wife_ —all whirling into one.

His life is going in circles. Everyone keeps honking at him to get out of the roundabout.

*

Caroline’s parents are a harmless old Catholic couple, open-hearted, the most stress-free parents-in-law Greg could have asked for nineteen years ago in that church. When Caroline had practically screamed the “I do” and Greg thought he would die if he had to wait another minute for her to walk close enough for them to look each other in the eye.

“Greg, sweetheart. Our thoughts are with you. Are you staying healthy? Eating enough, on a regular schedule? We know you’re a busy man at work, you’re doing good, my boy, but you can’t skip anything, you know.”

His father-in-law in the background huffs with self-deprecating laughter.

“Can. Can Caro come back?”

*

The invitation to Mrs Hudson’s Christmas party comes on the 19th, and it’s a slightly panicking Greg who holds the phone face down on his shoulder and calls out through the kitchen.

“Caro? Talk for a second.”

She comes through the doorway, head tilted. Her hair falls away from her neck like a muslin curtain. “What about?”

Greg tries to talk quickly, lips moving frantically, nodding and shrugging and sticking his chin out. “Party on the 24th, at Sherlock’s place. Just for a few hours.”

“They can’t move it?”

“Can we set the road trip a day back? I’ll phone the hotel.”

Caroline looks unfazed. “Oh, means I can go to my parents’ house on Christmas Eve. Sure, it’s fine by me.”

Greg’s lips pull up in a grin that shows his front teeth – in those months alone, he’d never smiled at anyone after work hours. He’d genuinely missed Caroline, having someone to smile at. The easy cheerfulness they’d shared with each other. “Great, thanks, I kind of want to check up on John and Sherlock. Make sure Sherlock’s not assaulting shopping centre Santas, traumatising kids. Whatnot.”

Caroline nods hastily at the saucepan behind her husband’s hip. “Marinara’s boiling.”

Greg spins around, phone back at his ear. He rolls up the left sleeve of his blue jumper, bends his head over the stove and gives the marinara sauce a quick stir until the heat bubbles disappear for a moment. Pity the scallops have shrunk. The rising steam gives a shine and a flush to his forehead, dampening his grey hair. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll come to the party.”

*

“No, she’s sleeping with the PE teacher.”

_Shut up shut up shut up—Oh, sod it. No point._

*

“Molly. You okay?”

Her voice is soft, thick with inhaled tears. “Yeah, fine. Sherlock… Sherlock’s just like that. A lot.” She won’t make eye contact with him, just reaches deep into her paper bag as her sparkly earrings tremble next to her rose-pink cheeks.

“Something for you, Greg. I thought you’d be away on holiday so I was going to give it to John and Sherlock, to pass it on next time they saw you, but… Here you are.”

Greg half-raises his arms. “Awh, Molly, you didn’t have to.”

She shrugs and he can’t _help_ noticing how the light just skates off her bare shoulder. A bit of her smile comes back. “I brought lots of things along...”

Molly goes to give Mrs Hudson hers: a red bead bracelet and a gift card for some clothes shopping. Quietly, she tells John that Sherlock’s present is a new watch. If he doesn’t like it she can return it, don’t worry.

“Jesus, Molly, how much did that cost?” And John has that look, with the lowered eyebrows and the pursed lips, that says plainly to Molly: You spent – you care – far too much for him.

Molly only shakes her head and looks down in answer. It seems like she’s about to say something to Jeannette, but Greg can see on her face that she’s drawing a blank and she just escapes while John unwraps the sequel in a series he just started.

Greg holds up his shiny green box and waves it by his ear. “I can open it now, Molls?”

“It’s Christmas already, isn’t it?” she beams at him as she pours another glass of wine. God, her cheeks are really round and unspeakably pretty when she smiles so completely.

Greg gets his fingernail under a corner, and suddenly he’s holding a biscuit tin in the shape of the TARDIS from Doctor Who.

“Oh God, Molly,” he says fondly as she draws nearer again. “I’ve been after this for ages! How did you know my weakness?”

She looks shocked but keeps that manic grin. “I don’t know, I just saw it, wasn’t sure. But I hope it fits on your desk!”

“I’ll make room,” he grins. “I can never have a coffee without a biscuit.”

Molly pulls her forefinger away from the side of her wine glass to point at the TARDIS tin. “It makes the noise.”

She seems to remember something else.

“Greg. Are _you_ okay? About, you know, Sherlock said, the thing about—”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m okay, Molls.”

“It’s none of my business,” Molly says quietly.

They would have finished the red wine together, sitting on the couch with thighs touching and demolishing Mrs Hudson’s gingerbread men – if Sherlock had not emerged from his bedroom and barked, “Put your coat back on.”

Is there a problem? Does it involve him? Does it involve John? Oh, just Molly – who looks so torn between desolation and, what riles Greg up even more, resignation. “Oh, seriously, Sherlock?!”

“It’s alright,” she says, glancing down at her velvety dress and smoothing out a bit on her hip. “Didn’t make plans with anyone else. We can take my car, Sherlock, only you have to drive. I’m in the middle of a drink.”

But Sherlock is at the window, nudging the curtains aside. “No need, Molly. Mycroft’s got it taken care of,” he mutters.

Greg blinks at his watch. “Molls, you just got here. Right, fine, I’ll walk you out, shall I? Might go back home myself.”

He hugs Mrs Hudson on his way out – bless that wine for making him okay with doing that, because Mrs Hudson’s loose arms around his middle and her chest against his make Greg so much warmer inside, like a pot of oil getting lit under his diaphragm and slowly infecting him with solar heat. Mrs Hudson’s light brown hair sticks up in tufts and tickles his neck. Her laugh – which peters down into a fond sigh – is contagious as well.

Greg circles his downy grey scarf around his chin in the snow, on the curb outside 221B, and realises that it doesn’t hurt. Not the way Molly was hurt. PE teacher. Perhaps he expected it somewhere in a corner of his brain. Knew that Sherlock could always see something.

Perhaps because for the last five months, his biggest worry was that it would happen again. It might as well be true anyway, for all the time he’d spent thinking about it on those sleep-deprived nights. Greg can only wonder which of Caroline’s three schools the PE teacher belonged to.

*

First thing in the morning on Christmas Day, Caroline swings the suitcases into the boot and he punches a street name into the GPS.

They’d just been looking _forward_ to it so much. It wasn’t a very expensive trip, nor had they been planning it for long, but. _But._ Just. All that cheerfulness, all that _effort_ put into being excited. Like _children._ Psyching each other up so the other one would take the bait and be happy, too. Overcome that first resistance, and maybe you can _stay happy_ because you made it seem so easy.

It’s a fine spot of madness to have chosen Dorset to visit over the Christmas holiday. Caroline loves swimming at the beach but there’s no way they’d survive the temperatures in December.

But after a night’s rest, they drive to see the Durdle Door. Caroline sighs up against the car window, squinting at the golden textures in the rock arch. Greg turns off the map screen for some peace and quiet, leaves the engine on for the warm air conditioning.

“I don’t know why I like this place so much. Something about the ocean. Rocks and cliffs being weird. I’m wasted on London. You know how sometimes your soul just… resonates when it’s near something? A certain place in the world.”

Greg sucks in a breath, more like a tired gasp. She’s over the hill now but she’s… sort of quietly beautiful. There’s grey in her hair, but hidden under the outer layers of her fringe. She’s his wife.

He looks long and hard at her, then picks up her hand and kisses the cool knuckles.

Caroline turns her head in surprise, smiles. Her lips are shiny; she put on lipstick this morning. “Merry Boxing Day, Greggy.”

His mouth doesn’t move, but he feels the skin under both of his eyes lift, trying to bring the smile up there.

Caroline’s face relaxes too much all of a sudden. She looks nearly devastated, as if it’s painful to look at him. “Jesus, Greg, I love you,” she breathes.

“I love you, too.”

*

“When was it?”

He hasn’t got a single clue why he chooses that moment to say it. It’s about eight o’clock the next night; they’re just lounging around in the Bournemouth hotel room. The lamps by the writing desk and bedside are on and casting lonely yellow circles into the nightly quiet.

Caroline is standing over the suitcase near the door to the en suite, taking her shirts off the coat-hangers at her own leisurely pace. She freezes at Greg’s voice.

“Look, just. Say it. You need to tell me.”

Greg’s sitting on the side of the bed with his hands hanging between his knees. He watches Caroline’s arm disappear into the wardrobe for the last time, pulling her pink scarf off a shelf before dropping it into the suitcase. She presses her forehead against the doors after she closes them.

“Last week of November,” she murmurs into the crack in the wood.

Greg’s eyes close. “After I took you back.”

Caroline whirls around. She was starting to cry. “It was once, I was tempted, I was convinced you were going to throw me out again—You remember how horrible that first week together was—”

At the end of that week Greg had come home from the station, and it was the middle of the night, but they’d finally kissed again, in the half-lit kitchen where Caroline had been sitting in contemplative silence with her cup of peppermint tea. She’d waited as he exhaustedly stumbled around the table, eventually rose to take his shoulders, still his movements, press him down into the chair next to hers – and then it was just a turn of the head to kiss his cheek lightly. She was about to get him whatever there was left on the stove and some tea. He’d reached up to pull her chin back to him. He ate her up. Both their cheeks dry and cold while London – this dot on the globe and the postcode of their house a whimsical nothing inside it – revolved slowly into the arms of winter.

They’d gotten into bed – and they’d wanted slow, tried to make it so, but there’s no way to do that when you’re reclaiming everything you thought you’d let go of and so it was tear-stained on one side and breathless on the other, with shaking arms that tried so hard to bookmark everything again in the terror that coming back to _Caroline_ after four months would feel different. If it had felt different then Greg barely remembered it in the end – his brain whited out and he woke up with her finger touching the crest of his lip.

“But it won’t _stay_ once, will it, Caroline?” he shoots back, but it’s deadpan.

She’s looking at every corner of the room that does not contain her husband. One hand rises and falls in a helpless gesture, settles back on her thigh in a star. “It’s over. Done. We made up, Greg. We’re here now.”

He shakes his head. “You know what? I never got truly, properly angry with you. I took you _back_ , Caroline. And that’s the thing. I could give you a hundred chances, but then what sort of idiot would I be?”

Caroline bites her lip, tilts her head as if she could sniff all the tears back. At an almost glacial pace she shuffles to the writing desk, settles her hands on the back of the chair which has Greg’s grey coat thrown over it.

And then everything changes. Bed. Chair. Desk. Elbows shoulders his hands her hands with pink nails bitten short. They’re whirling together over the floorboards, chest to chest.

Caroline’s at a loss for words. She’s crying, mouth open in a silent wail, eyes squeezed nearly shut. Everything on her face flushed red. Greg slowly registers that he has her by the shoulders, doesn’t yet realise that he’s squeezing so hard.

Orange wool under his dry fingers. So much wool between them, these winter jumpers, covering her breast, heavy on his arms, making everything fuzzy and weak.

“I’m asking you. Do you _like_ doing this?” His face is smeared with tears he can’t even feel, making a helpless grimace with the same mouth he used to smile so madly with. “The same decision over and over before you crawl back and still be miserable?”

She cannot handle that (not the cold slap of that question, but the ferocity of how much he wants it answered even as he fears it) – Caroline makes a heartbroken whimper, covers her mouth with her hand and keeps it there like a lock. Her knees sag underneath her.

Greg can’t stop seeing her, this gorgeous, fantastic woman he’d fallen in love with twenty years ago and all the places _all the places_ someone else had touched and kissed and stroked. “Do you even—Do you even _care_ how I react? Should I tell you what it’s like? ‘Cause it’s never happened to _you_.”

“Jesus, Greg…” Like a plea.

He keeps talking faster and faster. “Because I don’t think this is about me, this is about _you_ getting it off your chest so you can stop hating yourself for it but you forget that I’m the one who has to deal with it every single _fucking_ time like it’s a favour when people tell me the news. So how many more times, Caroline? Hmm?”

She can’t stop shaking. It feels like ages that she’s been almost doubled over in the midst of her wheezing tears, and her abdominal muscles are on fire. “You loved me this morning, Greg,” she begs. “You loved me twenty-four hours ago…”

He’s still gripping her shoulders and all she can do is push her forearms around his neck and suddenly they _hug_ – but it’s more like she’s holding onto him, like she’s being buffeted by gales, about to be torn off the top of a cliff by the hungry wind.

Caroline pins her forehead to her husband’s sternum and hiccups into the triangle of space between them. Everything is dark there.

(In her head, she’s kissing him instead, kissing him hard and tear-stained and they’re stumbling on their feet, and nothing is better even though he pushes his hands firmly through her hair and kisses back. Because Greg Lestrade can’t _fix_ everything for her, not the entire world, despite being – and she still believes this – the best man she’s ever known.)

Greg almost holds her close. Takes the whole breadth of her shoulders into his arms, wrapping her in the loop of them. He wants to _hurt_ her with how hard he presses, all that contact like he’s trying to push into her with all the words he’s already said, make sure it stays there like a tattoo far under Caroline’s skin.

His chin is stabbing the back of her shoulder. Greg grits his teeth, lets out a hiss of air, a hateful laugh at the position he’s just found himself in. “I don’t want you to just _let_ me be angry! I—Christ, why is this so hard?”

He is so, so sleepy.

“We were old romantics, Caro. Bloody saps. We were going to get married and do everything together. Every day until one of us fucking _died_. You…”

They end up in bed with their socks and the clothes they’d worn to dinner still on. Greg on his back; Caroline with her arm over his broad chest, on her side, leaning into the length of his body.

“You’re a different person on holiday,” she whispers sometime around ten o’clock. She’s swirling the pinkie of her left hand over the right side of his chest in a gesture that’s too intimate for the fight they just had.

“You’re a different person at home.” (With the intention to cut. But he’s too drained for that.)

A sad laugh. “Easy to solve that. We could keep travelling. We could see the whole world, that way,” Caroline says wistfully. And of course she means running away, never letting herself get bored.

Or tempted. Or lonely at work, with her counsellor’s office at the end of that one corridor and only a fraction of the student body knowing she existed. She sorts out their parents and their homework and those bouts of adolescent depression. (Already grown up, already made, already young adults – other people’s children – they never grew up under her wing but she fixes them in those frank conversations the way she could never fix herself.)

They don’t change clothes. Greg reaches to the side to switch off the bedside lamp. They just let themselves cry slowly, down to flood the flat plains of their temples. Just soaking into the pillow until they manage to sleep.

*

The next morning Caroline sits up and leaves the blankets bunched under her knees. The slab of the curtains glows blue with light like a canvas of moons. Caroline’s red hair is wild and ugly.

“I think it’ll be easier this way,” she says plainly. Then, quieter: “When I don’t have to come home for you. When I don’t have to worry about… so many things.”

“We’ve got to check out before noon,” Greg mumbles, with the vague rising panic that comes with being late on a hotel’s timetable.

*

“Happy New Year, sir,” Sally Donovan says, glancing up from her computer.

“New Year, sergeant.” Greg’s steps feel a bit unsteady as he reaches the door to his office. The things he’d do to be able to take a nap with his head on the desk – but damn the clear partitions around this place. He opens the door with a miserable push of his palm.

Orange and green stripes on the glass walls of his office, a triumvirate of quiet viciousness just like the green label and the amber liquid and the round bottom of the glass.

Around eleven o’clock Sally peeks in with a stack of paper in her free arm. “Wilson’s report is done, sir—Headache, sir?”

Greg twitches a little. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

Sally frowns for a split second but jerks her head. “I got a message from Anderson, thinks you should come down and see. McKenzie case, sir? They found traces of blood inside the husband’s mobile phone. Under the battery.” There’s a look in her brown eyes that’s piecing together a timeline that includes McKenzie’s bloodied fingers putting his dropped phone back together, and it’s also silently shouting _nearly enough for a conviction_.

It’s what makes Donovan a good sergeant, and today it’s DI Lestrade who follows with a pounding heart.

*

It’s not as if Greg Lestrade is freshly broken-hearted and goes out asking for a magical mid-life soul-searching adventure where he rediscovers his sexuality and lust for life. His life’s never been a rom-com.

First of all, they’re barely friends; more acquaintances who smile frequently. But it’s a partnership, of sorts. Greg tries not to think of himself as borrowing Sherlock off his older brother like a sniffer dog off his owner. Definitely not. He’s come to understand that Mycroft Holmes hasn’t got a hand on the leash at all, actually.

Just. Strings. Everywhere.

Secondly, all Greg does is leave his wedding ring in the bathroom drawer. He packs a pair of black swimming shorts. And then he catches a flight to Athens. He takes a hydrofoil to Santorini, then a taxi to the town of Oia.

It’s pricey; Lord, it’s pricey. Oia is built into the cliff-side and… Greg shrugs to himself and says he’s there for the same reason as all the other tourists. He’s got a Greek cave house at the Golden Sunset Villas especially for it.

Greg sits on a deck chair among the whitewashed domes of houses and hotels and churches, listening to birdcalls at breakfast. He looks over the caldera, the bluest blue he’s ever seen. Somewhere under that gorgeous water is a dead husk of a volcano. It’s like a broken cake, leaving a thin crescent of rock like burnt crust in a baking tin.

He walks the two hundred steps (he chants _un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq_ under his breath when he gets bored of counting the stone steps in English, but he draws a blank after _douze_ ) from his hotel to the row of restaurants on the water’s edge. Greg wipes his sweating forehead and looks back up. Ancient layers of red and black rock stripe the cliff like a tiger. His eyes move from the ruins of the church to the windmills higher up, next-door to his cave house – but he cannot spot any birds.

So many things to take photos of.

*

Mycroft Holmes arrives on Greg’s second night in Santorini. He looks comically out of place, rolling his suitcase behind him on the steep pathways set with large pebbles, the wheels jumping and popping over the short steps. He climbs on and on in his white shirt and powder grey suit trousers. There’s a pale straw fedora covering his hair, tapered sharply at the front with a black band. Greg hasn’t been wearing a hat at all.

Mycroft unlatches the picturesque blue gate. Finds Greg’s cave house on the end of the path; it’s the one closest to the edge of the cliff.

Greg is standing next to the table and chairs by his front door, hands in his pockets. He raises his eyebrows. “You didn’t call ahead. And I swear the ferries are on strike today.”

“I flew. Charming accommodation you picked, Greg.” Sweat is pouring down the sides of Mycroft’s face, marking his temples and jawline with shiny streaks.

“Wasn’t expecting you this soon, mate.”

“Today’s protest in Syntagma Square does not require my attendance,” Mycroft says with a distasteful yet good-humoured slant to his lips. “The Greek slogans are rather repetitive. Economy this, economy that. Nasty bit of noise pollution.”

Greg shrugs one shoulder at his door. “You want to come in?”

Mycroft smiles, showing a sliver of white teeth. “I have the Windmill Suite.”

“You’re kidding. That thing has three floors.” Greg pauses. “Have you got your PA with you?” he asks warily.

Mycroft gives the slightest shake of his head. “See you after sunset.”

*

It’s a solid red ball which burns the thin, streaky clouds until they’re pink, a ball which glides down behind the tiny grey lumps of rock on the horizon, and sinks into the middle of the sea.

To Greg’s left, a crowd cheers inside the stone-walled lookout. They’re too far away for him to discern individual bodies. Turns out his little traditional cave house has a fine view of the sunset; he barely has to walk eleven paces from his door to lean against the thick whitewashed wall next to the stairs.

It’d been unfortunately cloudy on Greg’s first night. Today the sky is much clearer and the sunset takes his breath away. The sky is just so _empty_. And so is the ocean.

While Greg leans his elbows on the wall, Mycroft sidles up behind him.

“Great to get London out of your lungs, isn’t it?” Greg says brightly, rocking back on his heels.

And he looks sidelong at Mycroft Holmes, who lived and breathed Mother England.

Mycroft quirks one eyebrow, gaze travelling from Greg’s ankles to his chest, where a wide ‘v’ of skin and curls of near-invisible hair are exposed by his partly-unbuttoned shirt. “You’re outrageously tanned, and you’ve been here barely forty hours?”

“A man can’t take his top off for a swim?” Greg smirks. He points down at the water all of a sudden. “Look, there’s a boat,” he says. It’s a tapered white speck circling back towards the dock. “They take some tourists over the caldera to watch the sunset.”

The sun’s completely gone now, so Mycroft stops squinting. He places one long-fingered hand on the wall beside Greg, the other hidden in his pocket, and leans over. He comes close to crowding against Greg’s back to look at the view over his shoulder. When Greg feels the vibration of the word against his ear he jumps minutely, but it’s only a harmless, “Dinner?”

Greg clicks his fingers and grins. “Found a great place last night. Best lamb chops you’ve had in your _life,_ trust me. Shut up, don’t say a word, I’m making you come with me. Also, _shut up,_ you’re on holiday. We can let ourselves go.”

*

It is nothing like Thailand but Greg knows Caroline would have loved this – gazing slack-jawed at the vast blue caldera, like a blown up version of that lagoon near Phi Phi (but that was a dream) and walking alongside the local dogs through the town. Buildings glaring chalk white and painted blue domes screaming at the sky.

It’s an unassuming name for the restaurant, Blue Sky, and Greg sticks to his guns and orders two of the same. He settles back with his fingers laced over his belt, triumphant. He hasn’t had dinner out with someone for a while, actually. There are a number of ways this conversation could go.

It goes backwards. Mycroft says after sitting down, “I’ll be leaving tomorrow afternoon, of course.”

“Yeah, well.” Greg shrugs gently; the timing has been helped all it can.

“But it’s nice to see you.” Mycroft sweeps a hand across his dark hair. His white sleeves are folded up and the silver strap of a watch makes a rare and bold appearance on his wrist. He doesn’t mention work again. But when Mycroft looks up from flicking the pepper shaker with his fingernail there’s a joke waiting behind his eyes that he definitely isn’t going to say.

Greg talks about everything he can think of under the stars.

With the onset of twilight other diners start coming up the stairs, finding their own tables covered with blue chequered tablecloths and gazing silently at the darkening sky surrounding them. Greg starts being vaguely conscious of where his hands go, what he’s looking at, whether or not he’s stuttering. Halfway through their meal Greg sucks his stomach behind his belt when he leans over to spear a disc of fried potato off Mycroft’s plate. Without pausing for breath in the middle of his recount of the history of the Acropolis in Athens, Mycroft extends a pale forearm to steal Greg’s slice of cucumber.

“But how are you?” Mycroft uses the tip of his knife to pin down his last lamb chop, tugging a strip of meat away from the bone with his fork.

“Fine, you know. Lots of sun, you saw the tan. You should try swimming here, actually. If you have time to go down to the dock. Or… There are a couple of restaurants there; you have time for lunch tomorrow before your flight? Fresh seafood and all.”

Mycroft had started laughing softly at the mention of swimming – him, swimming – but the suggestion of lunch keeps the smile of mirth on his face. God, there’s never _time_ for him to go anywhere _near_ the pebbly beaches of Britain. He hasn’t since he started working – when his suits were shorter and slimmer and cheaper.

“Greg Lestrade, get your euros out of my sight,” he says smoothly when Greg empties his plate before he does and raises his hand at a wandering waiter.

“Thanks mate, but just the bill,” Greg tells the waiter when he comes back with a clear bottle and two glasses. He’s left blinking at the alcohol set down between their plates without touching it.

Mycroft clicks his tongue. “Stop hiding your wallet under the table. You look utterly stricken with guilt.”

“You came to Greece to keep me company. It’s just a plate of lamb, so I’m paying, alright?”

“I was already in Greece.”

“Fine, you came to _Santorini_ to keep me company.”

“Santorini would have been a waste had you been on it alone.”

“Where’d that even come fr—?” But Greg trails off and starts smirking.

Mycroft hasn’t missed a beat either. He has unwrinkled euros in his fingers already, and his arms are longer, but it’s a pity that Greg Lestrade isn’t nearly as subtle, jerking his arm out at the returning waiter. “All there, thanks for the meal, see you tomorrow.” Mycroft clucks his tongue again as he follows Greg away from the table.

The conversation ends with the only thing that they really have in common, on the dark, twisting walk back to the Golden Sunset: “How’s Sherlock?”

*

Three days after Greg lands back in London, he’s on a train to Dartmoor.

“You two after this 'Hound of Hell' like on the telly?”

“You’re brown as a nut! You’re clearly just back from your _holidays_.” Sherlock is practically pouting.

Greg sweeps off his sunglasses. “Hah, should have known you’d get it, although I was waiting for an in-depth explanation of how my new shirt was clearly bought in Athens. What are you up to, John?”

“Oh, this is _Mycroft_ , isn’t it?” Sherlock says loudly.

“Now, look, it’s not like that—”

“Of course it is. One mention of Baskerville and he sends my handler to—to spy on me _incognito_. Is that why you’re calling yourself _Greg?_ ”

John’s silent frown dissolves into, “That’s his _name._ ”

Sherlock almost gets whiplash from turning his head. “Is it?”

“ _Yes!_ Jesus Christ, Sherlock, you’ve known me eight years. Probably only noticed my existence for six, though.” Greg takes another long sip of his beer. “Look, I’m not your handler. And I don’t just do what your brother tells me, thank you very much.”

John is reaching into his pocket. “Actually, you could be just the man we want…”

*

“It’s dead?”

“Put down.”

“Yeah. No choice. So it’s over.”

“It was just a joke, you know?”

“Yeah, hilarious. You’ve nearly driven a man out of his _mind_.”

*

“Oh God. Oh, _Christ_!”

He aims his torch and fires his gun but John is better than him, calmer, steady hands on the battlefield and then they’re both pulling a howling Henry Knight off the man who murdered his father – but Greg could just let him go, could just let Henry scream and hit, but he’s an officer of the law, damn it—

_Damn it!_

Everything is dark as they run. Greg’s arm jolts while he tries to hold the torch in front of his path; the bottom of his lungs start to ache above his diaphragm.

And then everything is bright.

*

“John, mate, you know I can’t.”

“Well, I need to get out for a bit. Can you believe it – when I started asking him about the gas at Dartmoor he tried to distract me by getting sauce for my sausages. And when—No, I’d better tell you this in person.”

“Fine, but I’m staying for two beers and nothing more. Otherwise my doctor says I’m not allowed. Hang on, he really played clips of dogs growling through the speakers?”

*

After a confrontation that involves Sherlock’s absolutely _imperious_ posture and the words “blundering”, “about as subtle as a drunken rhinoceros”, and a mocking salute aimed at Greg before Sherlock stalks off in his big coat and John less threateningly in his leather jacket (“we’re off to Covent Garden, text you later”), Greg Lestrade finds himself alone outside a pub with Mycroft Holmes.

Fine, he’s kissed a couple of boys in high school – half the time by _accident_! – but then he’d met Caroline, and well, they were _kind of soulmates,_ weren’t they?

Mycroft’s drawn his arm across Greg’s shoulders, still tenuously gripping the handle of his umbrella with that hand behind Greg’s back. White fills his vision and the only thing Greg feels is _off-balance_ – first of all he’s literally being tilted backwards on his feet but at least he’s got a firm arm supporting him – and secondly and less literally there’s someone breathing onto his upper lip and – and it’s Mycroft Holmes.

Greg makes an undignified choking-for-breath noise through his nose and Mycroft abruptly steps away, one hand moving to and staying on Greg’s jacketed arm to let him regain his footing.

“That was too far.” Mycroft’s voice only just registers through the ringing in Greg’s ears.

“No, hang on,” Greg blurts, “no, I’m just—I’m confused, and surprised, and give me a moment, alright, you can’t expect a man to switch off being married for nineteen years.”

But oh, he’s not married, is he? He’s not – he’s not married – he’s not… gay. They’re _friends_. They were acquaintances. Until Greece.

“I’m never going to get an explanation for Santorini, am I?” he says aloud. “Oh Christ, was that a first date? I swear I thought it was just a pity-companionship thing like, hey, let's make sure Sherlock's pet inspector guy in the police doesn't drunk-dial his ex-wife and decide to hop off that pretty cliff next to his hotel room, but okay, I guessed wrong, didn't I?”

Mycroft closes his eyes, slowly brings up a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. “For the love of God, are you going to come back to mine for a glass of wine or not?”

Greg blinks. “I don’t drink anything stronger than beer.”

“I _know_ you don’t,” Mycroft snaps. The point of his umbrella taps against the wet concrete and Greg jumps at the noise, small as it is.

“Right…” Greg says slowly. He licks his lips; his tongue is pathetically dry. “Okay, we’re going to try that again.”

Greg digs his fingers into the knot of Mycroft’s tie, and a split second later he’s half-frozen in horror because _it’s Mycroft’s tie –_ _ **whoops**_ – but then he closes his eyes just before impact and the world goes away. He tries to relax his scrunched up nose and focus instead on the cool lips that are now warming under his breath.

And then there’s a warm tongue, just a little lap at the crown of Greg’s upper lip, and it’s so shockingly gentle that Greg laughs into Mycroft’s mouth. He feels a tug low in his chest – that’s unexpected – and… Greg wants to go further; he wants to chase that flash of warmth inside Mycroft’s mouth; he wants to touch; he wants to be inside; he wants to feel like he’s in love; so his own tongue moves everywhere he can and he can’t believe that all of a sudden he’s allowed to do this. That he _is._

The noise that Mycroft makes in return is quiet, nothing more than a purr. His mouth closes and pops wetly off of Greg’s. “Mine. Glass of wine.”

*

Greg knocks the box off of Mycroft’s shelf and into his waiting hand with a triumphant cry. “Hah! You’ve got macadamia cookies. Nice.”

Mycroft’s amused horror at Greg being a man who sees wine as little more than a drink to wash the crumbs out of your mouth must show on his face. He stands rooted to the spot on the other side of the kitchen, bottle of white wine balanced between both hands.

“Shut up.” Greg waves his hands in front of him. “It’s… flavours. It’s white wine; macadamias are white, yeah? _Shut up_. After my marriage ended it felt like my TARDIS biscuit tin was my only friend.”

Mycroft shakes his head. “Oh, _Greg._ ” But there’s nothing he can do to hide that smirk.

*

“ _Greg. Short for Gregory?”_

“ _Pfft, no. It’s just Greg. For Greg. My parents weren’t that creative.”_

“ _I wish I could say the same…”_

_All those years ago, they’d smiled. One rather tightly, but amused. The other opened up in a crescent moon grin, breathing through his chuckle. The air smelled of rain and stars._

*

The days of four fingernails in his left arse cheek are over. Caroline's fingernails, as she pants luxuriously underneath him; Caroline's belly which he kisses for good luck they never got. He’ll never look into a little girl’s face and see _Caroline’s mouth_ and _his nose_ together, centimetres apart until she grew bigger. Cupid’s bow and button nose are swept away, blown apart like the waves on a sand dune.

Greg’s forty-five. He never went looking for this. It’s just… the end. Of everything he knew before.

Mycroft isn’t oddly breathtaking or compelling the way Sherlock is. But he’s striking; something about the marble smooth forehead makes Greg’s insides twitch. He wants to go up on his tiptoes and kiss the freckled skin, touch that one spot on his cheek.

Kind of.

But then Mycroft takes off his jacket and throws out the chain in his waistcoat pocket. The first thing that registers is the white vulnerability of his arms from cuffed wrist to the seam on the shoulder, and then the taut buckled band of fabric across his lower back and above the swell of, well... quite a nice round arse in charcoal and white pinstripes.

Alright, this could bear some more consideration.

*

Spirits are high and it’s a prosperous summer for detectives and inspectors alike. The boring part of the press call is over, and Greg can finally get up and give Sherlock his present. Oh, his fingers are _itching_.

“From your beloved Scotland Yard. We all chipped in,” Greg beams.

There are cheers when their consulting detective pulls apart the blue wrapping paper. “Oh!”

The little Greg inside his brain is throwing his arms in the air and going, “Woohoo!” at the confused, then terrified, then hateful glimmer in Sherlock’s eyes.

“Put it on!”

“Yeah, put it on, Sherlock!”

Sally Donovan is smiling prettily by the door, clapping prettily, and… Anderson is making eyes at her. Oh, Jesus Christ, Greg had told him to lay off! He’d met Anderson’s wife and so had Donovan, come to think of it. Drunken mistakes are one thing; making _eyes_ at each other is another. Really, this couldn’t go on…

Sherlock’s dark curls are in his eyes, squished under the brim of the cap. Under his pained smile he hisses between his teeth, lips unmoving: “John, the hat is _back_ why is it back get it _off_ me _please_.”

*

“Hello?”

“Sherlock is being… himself. I ask for your cooperation.”

“Who is th—Mycroft?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Sorry, I’ve got the telly on. Bit loud. Okay, what is it?”

“Well, you can imagine.” Now that Greg’s flat is quieter the rich timbre of Mycroft’s voice fills his attention. “There’s a small matter I want Sherlock to look at, but as I said. He’s being himself.”

Greg puts the phone on speaker and leaves it on the kitchen table while he rinses out a mug. “So, what, you want me to withhold Met cases from him as punishment? Don’t you know we just wrapped up one? Most wanted on Interpol and all that – Peter Ricoletti’s going to trial. So Sherlock’s pretty much gone _off_ me, now.”

Greg chuckles, coming back to sit down at the table and angling the phone towards himself. “Can’t take too much of our thick-headedness for extended periods, he says. He’ll switch to a private case through the blog, you know it.”

“If he wants a palate cleanser then he could take _this_ one,” Mycroft half-growls.

Greg laughs louder. “What is it, some MP in another sex scandal? You know the cheating spouses thing bores Sherlock to _death_.”

“Very funny,” Mycroft drawls. “Sometimes I wish the contents of my inbox were that mundane. I’d figure this out myself, you know. I just need more information.”

Greg mentally inserts the image of Mycroft frowning crossly while interviewing suspects, or diving onto the floor to stare up dead victims’ nostrils like Sherlock did. “Then get out there, you lazy bugger!” he calls into the phone.

Mycroft’s put-upon sigh drifts back out of it. “Work, work, work.”

“Wait, wait, Mycroft!” Greg is giggling so hard he can barely separate his words. “Have you seen the deerstalker hat we got your brother?!”

*

In another universe, Sherlock Holmes doesn’t jump. In that universe, DI Lestrade would have followed a man into a fire escape and been shot in the stomach. He would have bent for a moment over that man’s shoulder, chin on a red shirt. Instead of going back his killer would have continued down the concrete stairway, onto street level and out. Lestrade’s body would be discovered when the office staff, urged on by the alarm tripped after the door’s first opening, congregated at the fire escape all together, expecting either a drill or a small, manageable fire somewhere else in the building. Too late for him. Caroline would have come to the funeral, utterly inconsolable.

*

In another universe, Sally Donovan picks up a photograph. “A footprint…” she mutters. “You know our boys couldn’t have done it.”

“Well that’s why we need _him_ ; he’s _better_.”

The truth of it is that’s all Greg’s ever wanted for him, for him to be better in (at least some, if not all) the ways that matter.

“He got all that from a footprint…”

“It makes sense when he lays it all out, yeah?” Greg taps a finger on the corner of the photograph in Sally’s hand. “You know, the usual. We see the shape of the print, we get shoe size ergo foot size ergo rough estimate of the guy’s proportional height—”

“He tracked down mud next to a sweets factory on a GPS! Am I the _only_ one feeling a little sceptic about that?”

Greg removes his hand and puts them both on his hips. He levels his gaze at Sally Donovan. “What’s your point?”

She folds her arms and looks right back at him. “You know what my point is; you just don’t want to think about it.”

*

“Do as he _says_!” He can’t quite believe the words are coming out of his mouth.

Greg’s stomach touches the top of his thighs when he bends over, lower legs supporting his weight; his knees start to tingle from being pressed into the road. His heart is shuddering painfully against his breastbone with the adrenaline. Greg’s face hovers above the asphalt of Baker Street and when he looks up again, as expected, Sherlock Holmes is gone.

*

“This is not how I pictured starting an early morning, you two.” Greg pushes open his office door and Sergeant Donovan and Anderson tail him. He walks a few paces down the hall and turns back, hands on his hips. “Look, as soon as the Bruhl kids have some time to recover then we can bring ‘em back here and see if—”

He feels his phone vibrate in his right pocket. “Hang on,” he mutters, looking away just as Anderson turns to Sally and whispers something.

“Hello?” Greg says into his phone.

It’s Molly Hooper. Her words come out tense and nasal, like a whine. _“Sherlock’s in hospital.”_

“What?” Greg turns his head sharply, leaning his ear into the phone. “Where, St. Bart’s?”

It’s clear that Molly is barely breathing, holding her breath whenever the words aren’t coming out. Trying to stop herself from making unnecessary noise – keeping the tears under whatever control she can. There’s a faint slapping noise again and again, like she’s pressing her palm to her forehead and kneading her wet eye socket.

Molly finally breathes again – a shivery, nervous laugh. “Yeah, St Bart’s, he’s in St Bart’s. In St Bart’s. But Greg—” She sounds nothing like herself: her normally mellow voice has lost all its resonant textures, now stretched and pulled high.

“I don’t know what to do, John’s being treated for shock inside but I can’t—I can’t—He’s gone, Greg,” Molly’s voice breaks over the ‘g’s. “Sherlock jumped off the roof and they’ve _lost him_ , he’s gone, Greg, he’s _gone_ and I don’t know what to do!”

*

Sally is _furious_. As Greg runs down the carpeted corridor she actually overtakes him, swearing thunderously with her blouse sleeves pushed up to her elbows. In the New Scotland Yard car-park Sally makes her way to her own car, kicking off her heels and pushing them under her seat out of the way of the pedals.

“Sally, wait, hang on!”

“Get in or get out of the way,” she barks and slams her driver’s door.

Greg runs to the other side and bends to poke his head in. “Sally, you have to calm down or I’m not letting you drive.”

Sally already has the engine chuckling into life, orange lights popping up on her dashboard. Her right hand comes up to take hold of the steering wheel and Greg sees that her fingers are shaking. Sally seems to catch sight of it as well, aware enough in that moment to swat at the leather with her left hand and let out a drawn-out growl of disgust. She clenches her hands, and her shoulders start trembling.

Her head whips to Greg, pinning him with a brown-eyed glare. “Drive, then.”

They switch places and Greg fixes the mirror and has his hand on the gearstick when he realises, “We don’t have a siren.”

“Too late, come on. Did you say St. Bart’s?”

On the way, Sally curls a little in her seat and kneads her forehead. “I didn’t expect him to fucking jump off a _building_!”

There aren’t any tears on her face but Greg can hear it, the lumps and the tightness and the panicked rage trickling down her throat. He feels like he’s gargling syrup, himself.

Greg squirms out of his jacket at a red light – he’s sweating like a river down between his shoulder blades – and swears at the morning traffic. Sally looks like she’s about to scream some more.

(Because what if she’s wrong, what if she had been wrong that morning and the day before? About him, about the Bruhl children kidnapping case, about the veracity of his methods. She struggles to remember now the things he couldn’t possibly have known but nevertheless voiced: her parents’ split written in the tautness of her neck, the failed piano exams drawn in curlicues on her knuckles – from _years ago_ so how could he have known, how could he have seen it all? And even then – _“You can’t even read music anymore…”_ – he’d never hurt her, by knowing that. _Not yet._

If she’s gotten it wrong then a falsely accused fugitive has – apparently – committed suicide. If she and Anderson are right, then, a man they knew has still – apparently – _Are they there yet?_ – been pronounced dead.)

*

Greg doesn’t know what he’s searching for but his eyes rake across the façade of St. Bart’s Hospital as he tries to find a parking space.

And then there’s the puddle of blood on the footpath, smeared and soaked up with rags minutes before. Clean it, wash it, hide it away from the public.

There’s nothing much to see; it is as Molly said. John treated for shock, Sherlock pronounced dead, and what’s this about someone from Scotland Yard calling to say Mrs Hudson had been shot that morning?

“That’s bullshit.” Greg turns to Sally, standing in the hospital foyer with her arms folded tight. “Nothing happened at Baker Street, right?”

Molly shakes her head helplessly. There are pink spots of colour on her cheeks and nose and puffy rings under her eyes. Before she can gather the breath to reply, Mycroft Holmes comes through the doors.

He’s got a thick grey overcoat on, buttoned from thigh to chest. The ubiquitous black umbrella is in his hand but instead of swinging steadily above the marble floor as Mycroft walks, the point is scraping along it in a staccato rhythm. Mycroft’s strides are uneven.

“Ms Hooper,” he says. “Can I count on your company a second time?”

She pinches her nose and steps back from the group. “Yep, that’s me… You’ve got to identify—and then… I’m sorry.” Molly’s ponytail flicks in the air as she turns sharply, tilting her face down and heading towards the lift to take them down to the morgue.

“Mycroft?”

Greg catches his elbow, and the first time Mycroft directs his eyes at him since he arrived it is the look of a guilty man, that sharp nose incongruous with the weakness everywhere else, in his widened eyes. It’s the softest, most defenceless Greg’s ever seen him. Mycroft's never looked at him like that. Mycroft slips out of his grip a second later to follow Molly.

Greg’s been feeling sick with restlessness since he got to St. Bart’s Hospital. He’s not getting better.

*

“ _I’m waiting for an explanation, Inspector –_ why _are you here?”_

“ _I told you, I’m on holiday.”_

“ _You know he’s actually pleased you’re here? Secretly pleased."_

“ _Is he? That's nice. I suppose he likes having all the same faces back together. It appeals to his. His.”_

“ _Asperger’s?”_

*

Mycroft arranges the funeral. He does it quickly, brutally efficient, though to him it might have felt like tarrying. His brother’s body goes from morgue to cemetery in two and a half days.

John sees Mycroft at the gravesite, and bears it for five minutes before turning to leave. There’s nothing for him to see, or to say to a man who’d sold out his own brother. Greg arrives late.

By the time he locates them in the maze of headstones men in black suits – Mycroft’s men or workers at the cemetery? – are making quick progress on refilling the grave with dirt.

“Oh, God, I’ve been weeping my poor eyes out,” Mrs Hudson tries to whisper sideways to him, but her voice is rough with crying and carries louder than she expects. Her tone is so relieved that there’s someone else here other than that stiff Mycroft Holmes.

She remembers scolding him more than once in her protection of Sherlock, while his boyish airs infected the room over his newspaper or his violin, whatever he’d been holding that day. Her mouth is crinkled as she stands remembering everything.

When she glances at him again Greg recognises that look on Mrs Hudson’s face – and he’s struck by memories of his grandmother. It’s the look of someone who’s so tired, whose only wish is to sit down and _rest_ , right on the grass if she had to, legs folded like wings and laid on their side in a pair, but then, _then_ , the certainty that if she ever took that temptation then she’d never get up by herself.

Greg decides to take Mycroft’s hand as it hangs next to him.

It’s strange in the extreme, holding hands in public. Their fingers misaligned due to his clumsiness, Greg’s ring finger and pinkie caught around Mycroft’s middle. The very clear disparity between the thickness of Greg’s own fingers and Mycroft’s softer skin; a knuckle digging into the tense meaty part under his thumb and then the round stud of Mycroft’s ring.

His heart’s the heaviest it’s been in six months and it’s not as if holding hands with Mycroft makes it any easier. Maybe he’s both right now, strong and not strong, and late to a funeral he can’t explain why he’s attending. He wasn’t Sherlock’s boss. He’s not Mycroft’s plus one but _hah_ , the Holmes’s never accepted him in such _conventional_ roles…

Mycroft turns his head to him without moving another muscle in his straight shoulders. He focuses somewhere on Greg’s arm with a slow blink and a curl of brown lashes. “I’ve got to go.”

“Why? Now?”

“Work, love,” and that word is another cold silver strike to Greg’s stomach, a second burst of strangeness that knits his eyebrows together and pops his mouth open.

Mycroft steps away and moves his umbrella into his right hand. About ten seconds later Greg is compelled to look over his shoulder and spots Mycroft just running into Molly on the path. There’s finally a look of shock on his face, at the woman cradling a bouquet in both arms. (Mycroft sidesteps her, bids her, “Good day,” and continues on to his car. Molly nods and goes on three more paces before she laughs – grimaces – at what Sherlock Holmes’ brother had just wished her.)

“I almost didn’t come,” Molly mumbles when she reaches them. “It’s awful, I almost didn’t come… Isn’t John here?” She touches her lip worriedly and glances between Greg and Mrs Hudson.

Mrs Hudson takes the flowers from her unsure arms, saying, “They’re gorgeous, Molly.” She dips a finger past the cellophane to stroke a papery bundle of coral-coloured petals.

“Two or three lilies, and some,” Molly stutters, “carnations; I tried to get orchids but…” She trails off and blinks hard at the sight of the black headstone.

Greg doesn’t hesitate to put his arm around Molly’s waist, let her lean into him before he curls his arms around her narrow shoulders. This black dress with the lacy hem doesn’t fit her as well as the velvety one from last Christmas. Molly’s hair is down around her shoulders, curling inwards with pretty little flicks but turning frizzy in the warmth of June.

“I miss him,” Molly says slowly with her cheek pressed above the seam of Greg’s suit sleeve. Her lips are oily with a muted pink lipstick. Last minute decision to apply it over her chapped skin, tilting her face at her rearview mirror, tentative touches of colour back into her pale face. She has it all over her fingers.

*

“Oh, it’s asking me to leave a voice message. Hello, it’s Mrs Hudson from 221. Well, Detective Inspector, I’m just calling about um, well John and I are putting the flat to rights today, and John shouted a bit but I think there’re some papers here John very much wants you to have. Of Sherlock’s. Well, at least come and look at them, John was very firm about you getting a hold of them but he’s gone off somewhere now. I think they’re old notes on their cases, actually.”

*

Mrs Hudson tries so hard to smile. “I remember you coming over and looking at his wall with him, like two boys doing a school project. All the photos and his own writing on the corners. I tried to get him to use that plastic tack so as not to have so many pins that could fall off and be stepped on, but I didn’t like to disturb him in the middle of his cases. Catch him at the wrong time and he shouts right back at you.”

In and out of present tense like a sewing needle.

Mrs Hudson pats him on the arm. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m an old woman. You get so many friends dying on you, and I just think: you might be seeing them again soon, so who’s worrying about used to’s and is’es?”

But Greg imagines it, the morning Mrs Hudson was told. Mrs Hudson with her hands covering her mouth and nose, a pyramid of bony, arthritic fingers and shaking, shaking, weeping, actual noises of grief, boo-hoos far more primal than the words inked in children’s books.

“Are you sure I should have these?” He peels back loose pages in a manila folder; some of them aren’t relevant to the cases he’d called Sherlock in on. This one is labelled ‘Violet Hunter’s Doppelganger’ in blue permanent marker. It feels heavy in his hands and lumpy with torn notebook pages and post-it notes.

John emerges from behind like a spectre. From Sherlock’s bedroom, probably. His expression is hard and he points a finger at Greg. “You arrested him,” he rasps, “on a _suspicion._ ”

Something inside Greg free-falls and becomes a sickening weight in his stomach. “John—”

“Just _look_. Look! These notes, these photos, they came right out of his _brain_ and if you couldn’t see that it was all true when was happening right in front of you then… Christ.” John rubs his eyes, starts again.

“You know what he told me? When Sherlock was up on the rooftop, he told me to tell all of you that he was a fraud. He mentioned you by name, Greg. Well, you know what, Greg? I’m telling you he was brilliant. You _know_ he was. Moriarty planted everything. Sherlock lost your trust because of _Jim Moriarty_. But after that it was too late, eh?”

The rueful laugh John gives next is like broken glass.

*

“ _You can’t kill an idea, can you? Not once it’s made a home._ _ **There**_ _.”_

*

It feels like Greg never gets to see John anymore. The consulting detective days are over. But he can’t, he _can’t_ , lose John Watson as well. It’s that damned paternal instinct; he’s probably projecting what he’d felt for Sherlock onto John. He feels like he should be stepping in, keeping an eye on him. For what (for whom) he doesn’t know (because _He’s_ gone).

The day before John counts his cardboard boxes and leaves Baker Street, Greg catches a glimpse of how wrecked he is. John has one of Sherlock’s leather gloves and he’s squeezing it between his fingers. He’s focused so intensely on that soft leather which still held the shape of Sherlock’s knuckles like a mould, stretched out into shiny bumps by his protruding bones and two years of use. John could try and tear it if he wanted to – get his finger into one of the little holes on the back of the hand and _pull_. John’s crying.

“His clothes go to Mycroft,” John hisses before he pelts the glove into the box on the floor. There are tracks in the dust all over the floorboards, the migrations of abused box after box. The red rug in front of the fireplace is worn thinner than ever.

But then the crying stops and the old soldier forms over John Watson like a layer of calcifying rock. He stares ahead with stone grey eyes.

*

It’s a Thursday afternoon when Greg finds himself on the Tube, and he also finds Caroline. She’s standing there in her second-thinnest white top, the one she wears during summer, and a beige jacket Greg doesn’t recognise. Caroline grips three grocery bags with one hand and balances a Kindle with the other. But she seems bored of what she’s reading, flipping the cover closed and glancing in his direction.

“Greg!” Her face splits into a bright smile. “C’mere!” she says, and after a moment of shock Greg shuffles past the other passengers to get closer.

“What are you doing out here?”

Greg half-shrugs and grips a dangling handle next to his head. “Parked my car someplace else before I went with Sally on an investigation. Caroline, you look great.”

Her eyelids flutter happily and she shrugs back. All of a sudden she sobers up, remembering. “Greg, what the hell is going on? I don’t believe it for a second, Greggy. Not one _second_.”

“What?” Greg’s genuinely thrown for a loop by Caroline’s half-fearful, half-angry expression.

“The papers! It’s pathetic. That man was a genius; I’ve met him! And you, you found him when he was twenty-three years old and all alone and you _helped_ him, you gave him his career, Greg, how could… How could any of that be fake?”

Greg makes a noise and drops his head down for a moment. He tries to say something to Caroline when he looks back up but his mouth is still frozen into that fool’s grimace. He’s not sure if it’s a laugh or a sob but he feels short of breath – and suddenly he’s gasping and choking on top of Caroline’s shoulder, and breathing into this soft embroidered white shirt that reminds him so _painfully_ of summer.

“I am so. _Relieved._ To see you.”

Caroline manoeuvres her shopping bags between her feet and rubs Greg’s back, fingers stroking circles and figure-eights all over the back of his grey suit jacket. “Was there an enquiry? Thank God your job survived it anyhow. Oh, I’m sorry, darling, I’ll stop. Darling, sshh.”

Caroline pulls him off her and cups his face. Oh, _God_ , the sensation of her palms on his cheeks, his jaw, how long—? Caroline pulls his whole head down towards her until he’s bent low enough for her to kiss his forehead.

“Okay, time to cheer you up, sir. You haven’t forgotten about Thomas’ birthday, have you?” Caroline whips a smartphone out of her trouser pocket. She swipes through her photo album and brings up a picture of a boy, nudging three years old, wearing a striped green shirt and tiny denim shorts. Caroline angles the phone at Greg.

“There he is, grabbing my ankles. And the girls are the same as always. Bay’s going to cook. You’ll come to the party, yes? Your little princesses keep asking after you.”

Greg smiles. “They still call you Auntie Carly?”

Caroline flips her curly hair over her shoulder proudly. “They still call _you_ Uncle Greg.”

*

“Mycroft. There’s a reason I can’t call up the CCTV footage, isn’t there?”

“Hmm? I can’t imagine a problem.”

“Yes, Mycroft, there is, because I am—I am going _insane_ trying to work out what happened on the roof of that building and I am a fucking _Detective Inspector_ so I have a right to see those tapes.”

Mycroft’s voice on the other end is soft and faraway. “No. You don’t. It was a suicide. No crime was committed. It’s not your department.”

“I. Want. It. We found Jim Moriarty’s body up there, of course you know that, and he was up there with your brother. Don’t tell me you don’t want to _solve_ this!”

“I believe you’re following a risky path of thought here, _Detective Inspector_. I might even say dangerous.” Mycroft softens. “Greg, I’m busy tonight. You can call me back tomorrow.”

“Like hell I will.”

Greg stays up reading the slanted handwriting on every scrap of paper in the Violet Hunter case until he develops a headache and collapses face-down on his pillow.

*

“Hello?”

“Greg.”

“Oh, you’re calling _me_ now.”

There’s a stilted pause. Then, “Believe me.”

“About what?”

Another silence and a breath. “I’ve checked the footage. So many times. We can’t see anything.” And now he sounds worn, and Greg struggles with the idea of Mycroft Holmes being defeated. He knows it’s not impossible, though.

“Believe me that when my brother made his decision it was through reasons of his own. I think… that’s best. Whatever you need to put it behind you.”

“Huh. That’s all?”

“That’s all for tonight.” _Click._

*

Sally is staying calm, and Greg’s trying to, but some _fingerprints_ would be _nice_. They’re pacing around a rooftop car-park and Forensics are trying to gather enough evidence before the storm breaks over them. It’s nearly sunset, or at least it would be behind that blanket of blackened clouds, and rumbles of thunder are rolling across the cityscape.

They can follow the killer’s trail for several complicated steps but then the trail runs cold. The murder weapon’s been dumped at this point and even though Greg Lestrade is apparently the best of the Yard he can’t figure out _where._ He can feel eyes on the back of his head from the high-ups.

When Mycroft tells him that it’s in a dumpster behind a restaurant a certain number of streets away, Greg just barks, “ _How?_ ” at him. Mycroft’s face is white. He looks unnerved by himself rather than by the enraged inspector.

He shifts his grip on the handle of his umbrella, swallows to moisten his throat. “I can’t explain it like he can.”

He walks away on his own, under the silken black wings of his umbrella.

*

In the calm of indoors, Greg realises that they’re both Holmes’s. They’ve always been Holmes’s, since they were children, and then a child and a young man, chasing each other from home to university and then from offices to alleyways. Like chasing a trail of smoke from a snuffed candle.

“Wait, so I’ve always wondered,” Greg says. “Is it _genii_ or _geniuses_?”

Mycroft snorts. “You’re a well-educated and well-read man, Greg.”

“Yeah, but it’s been a while and I talk to hundreds of people who say it differently.”

Mycroft’s tone is matter-of-fact: “If we go by the Latin second declension, it’d be _genii_.” He pinches the top corner of his newspaper page and turns it near silently.

Greg tugs on his wrist to get him to look up; Mycroft lets go of half his newspaper and the pages collapse towards the edge of the table. It’s become an odd habit, since the funeral, to brush fingers over each other’s hands when they’re near.

“So. When you and Sherlock were kids. Were you… prodigies?” He’s read the case notes. He’s thought a lot. He looks Sherlock Holmes’ brother in the eye every day, and if Mycroft lets even this much of his cleverness slip into his everyday behaviour, then… Greg’s made his conclusion about Sherlock. It doesn’t change the fact that he’s dead.

Mycroft places the whole newspaper down on the glossy wooden table-top and reaches for his orange pekoe. “There’s no word for what Sherlock and I had,” he says under his breath. The pale shimmering surface of his tea catches the words, and ripples from china wall to china wall.

*

Years pass one after the other. Things change. The calendar fills in with pen scratches.

“How long have we been together?”

“Depends.”

“Oh God, who cares. Point is I think we should go on holiday.”

Mycroft’s head rocks back, exposing a lovely expanse of neck as he laughs. A few tufts of his brown hair catch on the back of the couch, puffing up out of place. “Are you suggesting some flowery ‘his and hers’ affair?”

“No, just, you know, time. Together. Someplace else.”

“I hear no difference.”

“Quit joking, Mycroft. Do you fancy Greece again or New Zealand?” Greg starts at that strong chin and runs a fingertip down to the hollow of Mycroft’s neck.

*

It all comes back around three years later. There is a bomb scare in Trafalgar Square, a woman is held at knifepoint in broad daylight, and on Greg’s desk at Scotland Yard (as well as Mrs Hudson’s kitchen table) sits an innocuous white business card.

The words on the card are handwritten, rather than printed, and it’s a rough, small-lettered font: _‘_ _ **I am the last step when you’ve stopped walking.**_ _’_

*

It’s the middle of the night. Greg’s car glides to a stop at the corner of Baker Street. He gets out and runs the rest of the way to 221, down under the street lights. But he remembers something, skids and turns around and makes to cross the street. Like some idiot Greg is whirling around in the middle of the road; his jacket was shucked long ago and all he has on underneath is a white shirt. At this time of night his shirt is fairly luminous and he’s a sitting duck. He isn't armed and any second could bring the whispering prick of Moran's bullet.

Greg turns—

—turns around again—

Baker Street goes up in flames.

Greg throws himself face-first onto the street, fingers too slow to pull his shirt collar past his ears. Light flashes and finds the crack between his eyelids, burning a seam into his retinas. Then it changes colour – from brighter than bright white to flames. Greg cracks open his eyelids and sees orange dancing over the asphalt.

Greg leaps to his feet to face the burning building and his shout is for, _“Sherlock!”_

*

It’s just a sprained ankle; he can walk it off. Greg sits next to a mostly unscathed Sherlock and feels the tension radiate off him; Greg feels unsteady himself after a few minutes.

“Sherlock,” he coughs out, “there were people who said you deserved to die. Three years ago.”

Sherlock scoffs. “I can imagine.”

“What? No, not like that!” Greg shifts in his seat to face Sherlock. “I mean strangers, in the paper, on the internet. People who actually thought you’d gone around committing crimes and pretending to solve them. Not… Not anyone you know. Half my constables took a week's stress leave, Sherlock. We couldn't afford to lose them any longer than that. There was this... Her name was Hopkins, and she looked up to you, so fucking much—”

“You were one of the three people. Moriarty’s targets.” Sherlock says this with a watery coat over his eyes.

Greg swallows. “Are you going to come back to work?”

Sherlock’s eyes go as wide as he can manage, being so tired. Greg flinches in sympathy at the grey bags under them. Sherlock doesn’t say anything, just makes a small questioning noise in his throat.

“I understand, it’s not your _job_ , not like that, never was _work-_ work like for me, with a suit and a desk. And not a lot of people will trust you now, not after Moriarty. And the media will go to hell but – if you want – I’m going to get you back in there. But... Sherlock.”

Greg stops and starts again at a different volume, a completely different tone, “ _Sherlock._ Do you realise what it is you do, really? You don’t just help us catch criminals, or explain how someone managed to kill someone else… We take these people to court, you know. And we keep the victims’ families updated to the extent they want to be updated. Sherlock, mothers and fathers and spouses have fallen into my arms and sobbed. You solve mysteries. God, you love finding out about the new ways people use to murder each other, while I’ve seen so many I could go crazy, but you give me and you give those families _reasons._ Those aren’t just nobodies who just happened to die, they’re… people. And nothing happens without causes and reasons and you give that to their families, Sherlock. Normal people would call it closure, I guess.”

Greg moves his elbow an inch to the left, to gently nudge Sherlock’s side. He’s gotten slimmer, but there are muscles built up on his arms, what a paradox.

“You know you’re going to have to tell John everything,” Greg says quietly. “He needs to know everything in more detail; not just what happened to you but _why_. That’s his closure, Sherlock. You’re good at that. Oh, _Lord_ knows you don’t make my job easier. Only, you do. I’ve always needed you, in some capacity. I’ll. Need you still.”

Sherlock turns his shaggy-haired head. One word, soft and undemanding. “Why?”

“It needs to be said. And I’ve got forty-eight years bottled up, sonny.” He can feel the faintest smile starting to crawl across his mouth. Maybe because “sonny” just sounds ridiculous. Or maybe not.

A nurse rounds the corner and spots the two of them. “You two for John Watson?”

Sherlock jerks away from the back of his seat, a quivering wire.

“Relax, all the shrapnel’s out, minimal scarring and no nerve damage.” The nurse glances down to look at her watch. “Okay, visiting hours start now, lucky boys, come with me.”

As they walk down the corridors, a woman comes out of a door and waves Sherlock down.

“Molls—” Greg starts –

– but Sherlock taps his heels together, hands folded behind his back, and says curtly, “You are relieved from your duties, yes.”

“What?!” That’s Molly; Greg swears that’s Molly Hooper standing in the hallway with them wearing her white lab coat over her skivvy and black trousers. “Sherlock, what the hell?”

Sherlock closes his eyes and breathes deeply, and with that coat collar up around his chin he almost looks like his old self. "There are a great many doppelgangers in this world, Lestrade. Or close enough. Molly Hooper has been in witness protection for the last two months. Long before I returned to London."

“You used a _double?”_

“As Molly used one to protect me, I paid her in kind.”

“Wait, oh God, whose funeral did I go to?”

Sherlock regards him calmly, with the cool, green eyes that at twenty-three years old had glared at Sergeant Lestrade from under bruised eyelids. “He’s no one. I erased him. All of them.”

“You did that for us? _Us_?” Greg looks again at the substitute Molly, standing patiently while the men snap at each other. She has the same brown ponytail tied low and over her right shoulder. The same nose, and…

“I’ll go now, Mr Holmes? Wish you the best of luck.”

It’s not Molly who jokingly salutes and disappears. Sherlock continues down towards John’s room with Greg stumbling after him. “Colonel Moran is dead. Molly can come back. I’m looking forward to _that_. I hope they didn't change the filing system in the lab.”

“Sherlock, wait, I’m an old man with a sprained ankle. Hey.” Greg tugs on his sleeve until he stops again. “One: Molly’s my mate as well and I want her back, Sherlock, but I also want her safe.” Greg waves a warning finger. “Two… You’re a good man, Sherlock. Better than most.”

Sherlock pulls the first smile of that early morning, both sides of his mouth curling up just one centimetre and dimpling his cheeks. He’s not offended that Lestrade didn’t say “all men”, didn't differentiate him from the stupid, the dull, but he's... He's better than most men. To have undertaken the last three years. For now, and for a very long time into the future, a good man is more than he could have ever fathomed.

*

In reality it's Mycroft who gets all the work done, lying barefoot on the couch with a laptop warming his belly. He snaps it closed and calls out, “Ms Hooper’s furniture and possessions will be moved accordingly. She can pack her clothes and fly back in three days.”

“Oh, God, thanks.” Greg crosses the room to lean over the arm of the couch, brushes his nose down the length of Mycroft’s (currently upside-down), and continues thanking him for at least seven leisurely minutes. Not with words, and he keeps his eyes closed, because oh, he loves sinking into the feel of Mycroft's mouth when the man goes still and quiet. Mycroft's toes curl against the couch and he arches for one long moment, like a cat who's for once easily satisfied.

Greg joins Sherlock and John to meet her at the airport. She comes through Heathrow Arrivals with a blue beanie pulled over her hair and only one piece of luggage by her side.

John immediately pulls her suitcase from her fingers, looks up into her eyes and says, “I forgive you.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, John. I can finally say it.”

“Whi- _ich_ is why I meant to cut you off with the ‘I forgive you’ thing,” John chuckles, hefting up her Samsonite luggage.

Molly turns. “Sherlock! You said the last leg would be a week tops, why did it turn into three weeks? I was mad with worry!”

Greg grabs her by the shoulders. “Molly, where have you _been?”_

“Oh, it was just Brighton at first, low security risk, but then apparently my status went up so I ended up in Vienna, would you believe it! I spent three and a half weeks there. Picked up a few German phrases, actually.” Her expression suddenly wavers and she looks unsure. “I missed you all. And I’m sorry.”

Greg crushes her into a hug. Then he cups her face in his hands, squeezing the apples of her cheeks. She doesn’t cry, or whimper, but she grins up at him with glittering brown eyes. The most nervous and the most hopeful smile he’s ever seen on her. Silent, and waiting.

“Oh, you brave thing,” he whispers into her forehead. “Molly Hooper, you brilliant, brave woman.”

*

They walk up the stairs to 221B. It’s the 27th of December – Mycroft had been working Christmas and Greg has to be in the office on New Year’s. It’s not even Boxing Day but Mrs Hudson is in a partying mood.  
  
“I come bearing gifts!” Greg proclaims as he wipes his shoes on the doormat. He holds the shopping bags in front of his chest when John opens the door. “Jameson’s for you; sauv blanc’s for His Royal Majesty.”

John just shakes his head, grins, takes the bags. Greg nods back at the stairs, where Mycroft is swinging his black umbrella over the top step and rising stoically over the landing. Greg clears his throat.

“Yeah, I, um. Brought a date as well.”

John blinks hard but at the same time there’s a funny little smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. His round nose twitches minutely.

Molly half-runs across the sitting room and throws her arms around Greg when he steps in. She’s wearing jeans and a bright pink turtleneck jumper, but it’s a _good_ pink and she’s soft and curvy and warm… It suits her, really. She’s not self-conscious at all, and just as beautiful as at the last Christmas party.

“Hello, you!” she giggles at him. “Oh, Greg, you came with an extra. Hello, Mr Holmes.”

Sherlock abruptly stomps out of the kitchen. “Molly! The livers you gave me are _defective_!”

Molly doesn't look cowed at all. She pulls away from Greg, back straight. “What’s the matter?”

Sherlock wipes his hands together in irritation. “They’re decomposing at completely the wrong rate. Come,” and he actually strides across the room to take Molly’s arm and pull her into the kitchen. To Greg’s surprise and Mrs Hudson’s mild horror, they bend next to each other to peer into the oven.

Mrs Hudson waves at John from one of the sitting room chairs. “John, dear, I’d like a glass of whatever it is you’re holding now.”

“Ohh, no, not in your state, Mrs H!” he calls back as he sets the bottles on the kitchen table.

Molly straightens up, ponytail swinging across her back. “What? Mrs Hudson, what happened?”

“She had her gallbladder removed,” Sherlock says curtly.

Mrs Hudson looks delighted that he remembers. “I’m right as rain aside from the old hip. And the four pins in my belly. Oh well.”

“In any case,” Sherlock continues, “her specialist said that she can return to a normal diet, drinks included. And it is _her_ party, John. Our flat; Mrs Hudson's cooking.”

“Shut up, Sherlock!” But John pours her a bit of wine anyway. “Take a whiskey, Greg?”

Greg jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “Mycroft will have one.”

John’s mouth purses but then relaxes after Mycroft takes the glass of Jameson from his hand and goes back to linger by Greg’s side.

“Sherlock, you _are_ going to come out of that kitchen tonight, aren’t you?” he says, rolling the syllables over his tongue.

“I assure you, the _very_ moment you leave the premises, brother dear.”

There’s a toast, later. Mrs Hudson beams and her face shifts into a joyous set of lines that stays for minutes on end. Molly tilts her head back to take her shot of whiskey, pale neck flexing under the light. John bumps elbows with Sherlock and it’s cushioned only by his thick woollen jumper; the laugh that comes out of John is bubbly and involuntary.

 _Their_ eyes meet across the living room. There’s only that companionable, spontaneous flicker of a smile between partners. Mycroft does a subtle turn on his heels and turns his wrist slightly, tilting the glass in his hand. He drinks to Greg Lestrade.

Sherlock walks across the room to pick up his violin with his eyes on the toes of his shoes and not meeting anyone’s gaze. His hands are restless under the cuffs of his violet shirt, twisting his old black watch around on his wrist.

Toast finished, everyone moves back to their seats. Before Sherlock makes a sound, at the very sight of the bow in his fingers, Mrs Hudson gives a little wistful sigh. Mycroft tilts his head back and watches intently, but his face relaxes and his free hand skates over fabric and thigh to search for Greg’s. John crosses one leg over the other and bows his head for a moment. Then he lifts it, and waits.

It neither floats nor wafts nor flows. The sound goes straight to their hearts, rocks through their legs as if they’re human lightning rods and permeates the very walls of 221B Baker Street with vibration, deep and resonant. Sherlock plays the song of their reunion and never closes his eyes for a moment.

Sherlock pins them all to their seats with his clear blue gaze and _feeds_ his playing with the sight of them around the room. These people blown apart and now back together.

Greg’s feeling quite paternal tonight, actually.

*

Outside the door of 221B, there’s a nice wide landing on the stairway. Half of it is shielded by the wall of what is, on the other side of it, Sherlock and John’s sitting room.

Mycroft bends his wrist around the back of Greg’s head and covers his neck with his long-fingered hand. Greg breaks the seal of their mouths to suck in a breath, before going straight back with the same fervour. He opens and closes his mouth against Mycroft’s thin lips, still soft and pliant and so willing.

Mycroft has a tendency to drift to the side after a while, to brush his mouth over Greg’s stubbled cheek and breathe warmly.

Greg moves his arms around Mycroft’s back; his left hand finds his right wrist and he uses his grip to pull Mycroft closer. “I think I love you.” The returning breath that hits his ear is instant.

“I rather think you do.”


End file.
